


the body as anagram

by snagov



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Grief/Mourning, Hair-pulling, Lost Love, M/M, Pining, Post-Canon, Smut, Unrequited Love, francis is kinda fucked up, gratituous abuse of postmodernist theory, sleeping with someone else as a replacement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:47:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25388521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: In the dark, it doesn't matter which James is in his bed. As long as Ross doesn't speak, the illusion holds true.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames, Captain Francis Crozier/Sir James Clark Ross
Comments: 24
Kudos: 72





	the body as anagram

**Author's Note:**

> Just a heads up that this isn't a happy story for anyone involved and absolutely no one here is well-adjusted.

_August 1852_   
_Eliot Place, Blackheath, London_

This isn’t the beginning. This isn’t the end. 

Doesn't matter.

“Francis?” The voice has come at his door, opening by an inch or two. Hallway light spills in. “Are you awake?”

“Yes.” 

The door unlatches and a slim frame slips in. A narrow shadow crosses the deep-pile rug, only the little moonlight reflecting on pale skin. A knee finds its way between Francis’ thighs, a wet mouth on his own. The mouth tastes of sour whiskey, but it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t care if it matters. Francis’ wide hand finds long hair, pulling the fine strands into his fist, baring that neck to his teeth. 

It’s red, his hair. Not dark. Francis tries not to look at it. 

“God,” James hisses. 

“Hush.”

James Clark Ross doesn’t say anything, just presses his mouth into a thin line and his violently hard cock against the inside of Francis’ thigh. A question in solid flesh. He knows to keep silent, this isn’t the first time. Francis doubts it will be the last. Rough hands, bitten nails, Francis is nothing beautiful but he’s starving so he reaches for a taste all the same. He grabs the sharp jaw, guiding that mouth back to his. Wet and open, warm and breathing. Alive. 

“ _James,_ ” he whispers. _God, you beautiful thing, do you have any idea how much I’ve wanted you?_ Francis and his tightly shut eyes, his impatient tongue. He imagines a wardroom on _Terror,_ James _fucking_ Fitzjames telling a tale with elegant hands and pretty words, his black curls falling just across his shoulders and gleaming in the light of the Preston Patent Illuminators. _God, I loathed you. Loathed you and wanted you, wanted to silence you with anything I could shove in your mouth._

He pushes his tongue further into Ross’ mouth, pulling tighter on that mess of (straight, red) hair. 

”Please,” Francis says, spreading his legs further, pushing down on this James’ shoulders. Ross swallows his cock in the soft wet of his open mouth, sucking like a lamprey eel. Francis likes to cup his cheek, his jaw, to feel the living pulse in his skin, to feel where his own cock stoppers this hole in his body. Close it up, don't bleed out. Close it up, don't breathe. His hips jerk forward and James chokes slightly. 

His dick dribbles. He rubs a hand in his own slick and smears it on Ross' lower lip.

* * *

The first time, Francis hadn't known what to say. 

"You've changed," Ross had murmured, swirling his claret. Red hair, red wine, a red tongue slipping along his lower lip.

"Five years is a long time." _Especially in that place._

"I thought you were _dead_ ," Ross had said, an odd look in his pale eyes. "I _believed_ you were dead. You were always … _there,_ Francis. Always here. Steady. Accountable. A regular man to hang your hat on. Christ alive, do you have _any_ idea what I imagined - " He'd had wine on his breath and pulled Francis' lapel across the table, shoving his mouth against Francis' own. 

Francis had held a white gansey jumper in his white-knuckled hand under the table, frozen. Ice again. Ice always. He hadn't kissed back, not until he closed his eyes. In the dark, all skin feels the same. A prayer in a common language, a prayer in lips and teeth. When there's an empty room and God is nowhere to be found, we take what we can and beg the saints to intercede. Francis shoved his tongue into Ross' mouth, begging him to be a saint for a night, to let him rub a prayer out between his thighs. 

"God, yes," Ross had said, unlatching Francis' bedroom door, trying to crowd him up against the wall. Francis took his arm and spun them, pushing Ross into the wallpaper and his leg between Ross' own. Reaching for that long hair and pulling his neck to the side, blank and glistening with sweat. Ross had inhaled sharply, furrowing his brow, trying to get Francis to look at him. But Francis had buried his mouth on that neck, lapping at the living pulse. Alive alive alive. 

(This is not how it had gone in the south. Ross had come to Francis' door, knocking on the Great Cabin and entering without waiting for an answer. It had always been _Ross'_ hands pushing Francis to his knees, always Francis pushed against the wall, his beating heart knocking upon the wood paneling, his thighs spread and body breached. This way, when it had been Ross with him. Not now, not this time. This is different.)

The white jumper had been dropped on the bed. Pushing Francis back gently, Ross had looked from Francis to the cream jumper and back again.

"Do you want me to wear it?" He asked at long length. Francis had glanced at the piece of fabric, imagining picking a strand of red hair off it later.

_No._

* * *

He kisses down the length of that pale, narrow chest beneath him, hovering at the left elbow, stilling at Ross’ left side. A kiss, a kiss, another still, all on blameless and unscarred skin. 

(“Stay with me, James,” Francis had whispered half a world away, wrapping himself around the too-thin frame in his arms, feeling the skittish, birdlike heartbeat through James’ back. He pressed a kiss to the dark curls. James bled. He smelled like iron. He smelled like a gun fired.)

The James in his arms smells of vetiver soap and tooth powder. 

He takes his time with opening Ross' body, measuring with careful precision, a sailor and his sextant. A good captain knows exactly how much room he needs to maneuver and how little he needs to get by. 

"Bear down," he mutters, brushing against the body beneath. 

He pushes in. His cock swollen red and wicked, hard and angry between his legs. He finds a home within a body, bending to kiss the bare skin at the nape of Ross’ neck, feeling the thrum of the steady, robust heartbeat against his chest. _James James James,_ he begs the world, eyes screwed shut. Dark eyes flecked with hazel, widening across an oak command table. The deep lines of his face, running down his cheeks and carving age into his skin. A warm smile across a tent, a hand reaching across an ice shelf. _James._ His eyes are wet. He doesn’t open them. 

(" _Please, Francis, I’m not Christ. Use my body, feed the men.”_ In the end, no one took of him, not even Francis. Buried under a cairn, pressed beneath a pile of rocks. Unpawed. The body untouched.) Francis reaches a shaking hand forward, settling at the base of Ross’ throat, feeling him swallow against the gentle pressure of his fingertips. Alive, alive, terribly alive. Francis rubs at his collarbone, the divot of his throat, his pale neck, never explaining why. 

The James in his bed doesn't ask.

* * *

Sometimes, later, after the spill and sweat have been wiped away and Francis lies alone in his bed once more, hands folded like a dead man over his chest and staring at the ceiling, he wonders why Ross comes to him. Who is he touching? Does it matter? A body is a body is a body. Reduce it to its barest parts. A bed, two bodies. His overflowing heart. Consider the heart as a vessel, love as infection in the blood. 

_James,_ he thinks, touching a James that is not _his_ James but in the dark is like enough. When the original is gone, we can build another. We obsess over recipes. Repetition. We want to rebuild, remake, stave off loss with our own two hands. What is _Terror_ sunk? The third of her name. If we build her again, cut from the same oak trees, lined with the same cypress, cut to the same dimensions, if we anoint her _Terror,_ is she not the same? The perfect simulacrum. 

_Wear a wig,_ he wants to say. _Wear this shirt,_ he wants to say. Replace each part of Ross piece by piece, substitute one James for another. There is an act of lovemaking to rebuild, Francis and dark-eyed James. There is an act of lovemaking he's never had. It must be imagined. _Wear this,_ he wants to beg, _it will be more real._ As if he had ever touched James in any way other than a hand on the shoulder, a hand in his own, a hand on his sweat-stained throat, coaxing the poison down. The original is nothing, the original is the fantasy. The recipe has never been tested. He'll never know if he's gotten it wrong. How is the imitation the only thing he's ever tasted? He's forgotten the edges again, where James stops and James begins. One lover (true, beloved) flowing into another (false, endured). One lover (false, untouched), and the other (true, held tight).

Let's write a story, write it down. Francis puts pen to paper, writing a letter to James. _I bit your throat in making love to you tonight. Did you feel it? Pulled at you in just the way you like, my hand fast on your cock, thumbing at the head of you, you were wet for me. Close your eyes, can you feel it? I’m touching you. Keep them shut, so I'm not alone._

Sometimes Ross slips, cries _Francis!_ with a fat cock plugged between his legs. Sometimes he can hear love on the back of the wind. He tries to keep his ears shut; he tries not to listen. Love is a language Francis has never spoken. Acquired through years of study, never put to test by his nervous tongue. He'd loved this sharp-nosed and blue-eyed James once, in a certain way in the south. This is a story but this isn't a story so let's strip to brass tacks. Love fades. Love dies. In the daylight, he loves Ross as a friend, a bright man, an excellent sailor. A billiards opponent, a gentleman. Not as he had done. 

Here's a secret, something that should be unspoken. Let's tuck it here. Sometimes Francis is glad he had never said the words, never reached for James on the shale. That the limestone only knew a certain kind of hurt. A love never begun is a love that can never die. This one can stay bright, living like a fire cupped in his greedy hands. This is a light that will never go out. Are you happy, Francis? He aches for _Terror_ , for a white sky above. Indifferent ice, a living breath. _Yours. James, I wake and I think of you. I sleep and I dream of you._ In between his memory, he takes meals with Ann and James Clark Ross there in the sunlit rooms of Eliot Place. He visits the bootblack. Rubs the exhaustion out from within his calves. 

Why can love only be known by loss? To rebuild, let us rebuild, use our desperate recipe. One part strong hands and two parts a crooked smile. Francis tries to mix the ingredients and build James again from the ground up, never getting it right. The devil’s in the details, in the spirit: love exists between the ribs. 

(Sometimes, alone in the dark, Francis lingers in his ache. He has loved twice, each a James that sits lithe and lean on his lap, hair long and eyes bright. Teasing and fluid, easy in a dress, quick at a quadrille, Consider a third James, as yet unknown. If the first could grow cold and unloved through absence, letting the second build a fire where he once lived, then it could happen again. _I could have stopped loving you,_ Francis thinks, hating himself for the thought. He sees dark, worried eyes and blood at the lines of red gums and knows that this at least will bring some little peace. To lose something, you must have it first. He will always be wanting.)

This is the difference between two nights. How do we know what is real and what is false? _This isn’t real,_ he thinks to himself, comforted by the thought. A borrowed body, a purloined mouth. He fucks Ross into the mattress, a placeholder in his own bed. Is it? He has never kissed James, nor known his warmth. There’s nothing real of the touch of him either. This imitation is real. 

The jumper wears from his constant touch. Francis learns to knit, repairing it little by little. Some of the fabric has never touched James. The years pass and his cells turn over, born again, some of his body has never touched James. In seven years, none of his body will know James at all. 

He wonders if he should burn the jumper and turn Ross out of the room. A body is a body and to reach in and bury himself in Ross feels like descending to the underworld. Like cracking open a grave. There is memorial and there is desecration and Francis doesn’t know which this might be. _Stay alive,_ he begs, pushing on a wound that doesn’t bleed. A scar that isn’t there. James again, always and after. This is the death incomplete, the death unaccepted. Dying is a process we never do alone. The first death, the body, is ours. The second death is the forgetting. He borrows Ross’ body, blending the two. Death bleeds between the lines. Again and again, fucking his cock into an open mouth, buying a little more time. 

This is a death interrupted. 

* * *

This copper-haired James pushes back against him, hips snapping hard. Francis curls his hand around his waist. He gasps into the pillow, an inelegant noise of an elegant man undone.

“Don’t talk,” Francis says, putting his fingers in Ross’ mouth like a cock and a cock between his legs like fingers. 

Why does he allow it? Why does he reach blindly for long hair at his shoulder, for a dick to keep his cries quiet, salt on his tongue? _Because love. Love again. Love is the distance between where I left you and where I’ll find you again. Next life. Tell me it’s the next life. Lie if you must. I am touching him because I want you. I lie with him because I cannot find you. Grief is a great alchemist, bending the law of transmutation, making his lips yours where we touch._

 _Get out_ , he wants to say. But it's foolish, we can't reason with our starved selves. In the morning, Francis might deny himself, but by nightfall he's poured a bottle of oil on his hands and sunk himself to the knuckle and bollocks between Ross' thighs, fucking him like a hungry man left alone in a kitchen. It's absurd, really. A parody, the way he tells Ross when to come in and when to come. Francis Crozier, pockmarked and lined, Irish and awkward, daring to let a _James_ know where he stands.

(In this, the difference between fantasy and reality is marked. His teeth tear at the pale skin of Ross' shoulder, his thumbs rub at lines that don't exist on Ross' cheeks. If James Fitzjames were in his bed, Francis would fall at his feet and kiss up his thighs, would beg James for a moment longer, for another word. Francis would beg James for indulgence, to put up with him just a second longer. He remembers falling asleep on King William Island under canvas tents and an unfeeling sky, his arm crossed over James Fitzjames' chest and thinking only a litany of prayers. _I love you, I love you, I'll always love you, amen._

It would have been the same once with Ross, a very long time ago.) 

He fucks deep, dick hard and half-purple, taut-skinned. His rough hands fumble at where Ross' cock bounces beneath them, pulling inexpertly at the cock he'd once begged to swallow. Another difference, were this his James, dark-haired and dark-eyed, Francis would bury his head in that mess of hair, inhaling floral macassar oil and the metallic tang of blood. But Ross doesn't smell of that, he's of wool and cedar instead, so Francis doesn't bend to him and keeps his mouth to himself. 

Reality and imitation again. 

"I love you, I do, I love you, God, James, how I -," he mutters, snapping his hips to the beat of his heart. His climax is thick and hot in his belly. He likes it when his cock feels like a lightning rod, hard and electric within a warm body. He kisses down Ross' back like a love poem, leaving trails of himself on the borrowed scapulae and spine. 

When he comes, he slams his eyes shut and gasps at the violence, hips trying to claw their way further into Ross. Ross scrambles further up the bed, pushing back, the sheets left a sticky trail of his own climax beneath. ( _Francis!_ Ross had cried. Francis tries not to think of it.) 

The sweat cools on his skin. His oversensitive dick twitches in the night air. Ross wipes himself clean with a flannel and rights his shoulders, tossing red hair over his shoulder in a careful, practiced manner. To someone who knows him less than Francis does, it looks casual. 

It isn't.

"Goodnight, Francis," he says, closing the door behind him. 

"Goodnight," Francis responds, still not looking. He's not ready to surface. Not yet. There's a jumper shoved beneath his pillow that he'll pull out and hold, falling asleep around. In the morning, Ross will laugh and trade newspaper sections with him. They'll form a shooting party, eat roast chicken and baked eggs. Just the same as ever. 

He wipes a smear of spill from his inner thigh, brushes the thinning hair from his brow. Sleep takes a long time to come. When it does, the sky is nearly light. He dreams of skin and bone, plasma and sinew. Long, dark lashes and a patrician nose. The cells and tissues of James' body, frozen in stone half a world away. The atoms of his body, the atoms of the body of the James in his bed, are indistinguishable to the rational mind from the James left behind. He puts his nose to a jumper that smells only of England, the shale and iron-smell of ice and salt left far behind.

There it is, in the end; the distance between truth and reality is want. Love, he has learned, is the distance between what is known and what is dreamt.

This is where seduction begins.

  
  
  



End file.
